When I say that I have been a feminist my whole life, what I mean is that I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. And that memory begins 50 years ago today, when Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs at tennis.

I was 3 years old, so obviously I don’t recall the details – or rather I could, but I wouldn’t be relying on memory. I don’t even remember watching the match per se…it’s possible what I remember is the news that night, reporting on the match.

Since memory is labile, even in adults, maybe I don’t remember it at all. Maybe my memory was created in retrospect.

But.

Most of us have those memories that feel unambiguously real and true to us because of their sensory completeness. We can time-travel and drop ourselves back into the scene through that sensory portal – a smell, the angle of the light, an unusual point of view we were occupying, a particular energy coming from someone close to us.

My memory has all of these qualities, and that’s why it’s as real to me as anything else in my life has ever been.

I was next to my mother, on our couch, in the living room of the house I grew up in. It wasn’t dark, but also not light…twilight, maybe, which would imply the evening news.

My mother wasn’t smoking but had been recently.

I don’t recall my father, but I assume he was in the room because they were still married then and my mother was talking.

He has his own recollection of the event, and it’s charming and fascinating and I treasure it, but I say with all the love in my heart: his perspective isn’t the point, and doesn’t change anything. This memory is not subject to autopsy.

Because I can drop into the feeling – an electricity, a sense of excitement, agitation, thrill, realignment – and it is for me inextricably tied on a cellular, somatic level to my understanding that I was a female person. My mother was a female person. And we were not the people who were expected to “win”, but we had.

There had been a show – a performance. The thing that had happened was not “real”, it was by nature performative, but in being so it was more deeply “real” than mere facts. Whatever had happened had illustrated something true, clearly enough that a 3-year-old girl could get the basic gist.

I can feel the way my mother reacted, physically. Tensing and releasing, moving, at one point squeezing me. She was responding to a lot of things, but they all orbited around the idea that we weren’t the ones who win, but that day we did. So…that can happen.

This has always been intrinsic to my concept of “feminism”. My understanding of the challenges has evolved, my expectations and desires have evolved, my concept of sisterhood has evolved, my definition of a woman has evolved. I hope I keep evolving and deepening my understanding for the rest of my life.

But at the core of the whole enterprise for me is that “we”, whoever we are, are not the winners. Women are those who cede: who are occupied, colonized. We are the ones who give, and serve. We are the ones who loosen any boundaries around our selves, and acquiesce. We are the ones who lose.

But on this day, we didn’t. There was a contest, a competition, one-on-one, head-to-head…and we won.

Personally? I hate contests. I hate competition. It took me a long time to discover that I don’t enjoy winning OR losing. If it were up to me, the goal of all social justice projects would be some sort of collaborative collective utopia full of shaved heads and Communist jumpsuits.

But that doesn’t seem to be how most of humankind prefers to operate, so…competition it is. Someone has to win, and someone has to lose.

We usually lose. A few years ago that was made horribly, starkly clear once again, when the stakes were very very high.

But sometimes, we win.
Not too often. But.

What I felt in that room, coming through the TV, through my mother’s body, into mine, 50 years ago today, is that it is possible.

And when it happens, it can set our bodies on fire.